Can someone help me turn a shell surface into a solid part?

sam_quintanar

I have seen the Tech tips showing how there are 3 ways to do this(thicken, fill, enclose), but none of them work for me! My document is public. The search name is 'Arduino_2WD_Car_Assembly_CURRENT'. The surface component is named 'yellow_motor_clasp - Shell'. Only fill and enclose are my options since the geometry of the surface component must remain intact. Whether I use fill or enclose, I keep getting 'xxx did not regenerate properly: Selections do not enclose a region.'  There must be something I'm not doing right and I need a solution. The reason I need to convert this surface to a solid part is so 'mass properties' values appear after assigning a material. Currently, even after assigning a material, the surface component will not display any mass properties.

NeilCooke

@sam_quintanar - I don't think it's a good idea to mark your answer as correct because it took 26 operations to fix it. Under the "camera and render options" menu (under view cube), there is an option called "highlight boundary edges" that will show you in red where the gaps are. You can then either use Delete face and fill to fix one surface or use my random technique above.

NeilCooke

Odd geometry - found where the issue lies though and bizarrely enough if you create a plane through the problem area, enclose then works.

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/8cccea823daf0511882af44e/w/08dc9ddaa569038fcb28804c/e/2a9cbf9a8d62e08d03363704

sam_quintanar

I found the answer by trial & error!

When using 'Fill', I was connecting every single edge available to close *all* 26 geometries in one go; which is wrong because the Fill tool does not operate in that way.

Instead, it was necessary to close each geometry *one at a time*; so the Fill tool needed to be invoked 26 times to successfully create a solid part based on the surface component.

Sometimes, closing a geometry was tricky because there were *hard-to-recognize* small edges needing to be included in closure.

IMHO, this Fill tool can probably be modified to be more efficient.

NeilCooke

@sam_quintanar - I don't think it's a good idea to mark your answer as correct because it took 26 operations to fix it. Under the "camera and render options" menu (under view cube), there is an option called "highlight boundary edges" that will show you in red where the gaps are. You can then either use Delete face and fill to fix one surface or use my random technique above.